Building Medieval Churches

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Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and today I've left my little DIY recording studio at home because I've been invited to visit a very special medieval church. It's in a place you've probably never heard of, a small village called Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire. But it's a church that's been described as one of the finest perpendicular churches in the country. We'll get back to what a perpendicular church is in a moment.

But it really is quite extraordinary. And it's also home to some of my favourite things. A group of medieval hunky punks. And if you don't know what they are, you will find out very soon. I'm here because I've been invited by expert stonemason Andrzej Zeminski, not just to learn about the church, but also to find out what a medieval stonemason actually did.

Because Andrew is the author of the book The Stonemason, A History of Building Britain, drawing on his own career over 30 years working on some of the country's most incredible historic buildings, from Neolithic monoliths and Roman baths to... medieval cathedrals and mills of the industrial revolution. So he's one of the very few people to really know the ins and outs of buildings like this.

So I'm here now today because Andrew is actually working on this church and he's invited me to see some of the really quite unique aspects of its history. Right, so here we are. Andrew, thank you so much for inviting me along. It's really brilliant to be here. Thanks for taking part in the podcast. Well, Kat, thank you ever so much for coming up to see us at Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire. So we just...

Standing outside the church right now and it really is quite spectacular. I mean, I saw the pictures of it, but driving up here through this beautiful sort of middle of nowhere countryside, you come to a lovely little village and then you...

got this which really i mean it's been described as one of the finest perpendicular churches in the country can you first of all just explain what a perpendicular church is well the perpendicular is the end of one of the sort of three orders of gothic architecture which you could argue starts with the Normans of the Romanesque era, and then it goes to the early English.

the decorated period, and the perpendicular. So that came around as a consequence of the Black Death, that so many people had died that there was huge amounts of cash sloshing around. Money was bequeathed to build churches, and this is typical of that sort of... church so this was thrown up in the 1480s so you can imagine

News of the Battle of Bosworth, you know, coming here as the builders are building this place that we can see now. And this would, of course, have been a very busy place. There would have been stowmasons working, there would have been carpenters, they would have been casting bells. You know, this would have been a massive... construction sites as were many parishes all over britain at that time and this part let's do palastin on this part of the country was actually quite

wealthy for various reasons as well wasn't it in the middle ages it wasn't just the fact that you had this money coming in after the black death but before that as well what was the wealth coming from here in the middle of nowhere well that's a really great question so you know we're in prime pasture land here. Salisbury Plain Rise is just over there and that would have been absolutely chock full of sheep so it's well-to-do merchants.

that paid for this and as we walk around the interior of the church you can see some of their merchants marks so they commissioned the works so this is a sort of new middle class gentry that was paying for this you know it wasn't just the landed gentry you know It was the middle class, whatever middle class meant in the Middle Ages, of course. Yeah, so very much the sort of wool and textile industry that's kicking this off, I suppose. Exactly, yeah, exactly.

So let's have another look at the church then. And later on, we are going to talk about these things I'm looking at right now, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to come here, apart from obviously the interesting story of the whole church, which are these hunky punks that we are going to talk about later on.

Let's go and have a look inside the church. Great. Oh, wow. Yes, it's a lovely church. We've not ventured beyond this point, have we? Let's go and have a look. Yeah, this really is not what you're expecting in the middle of a village like this. Tell me what we're looking at. OK, so as we've already said, this is a strictly perpendicular church. It's one of the most important perpendicular churches around.

in southern England, I would say. I mean, to have a vaulted ceiling of this quality in a rural parish like this is really, really unusual. I mean, Steve Palashan is quite a small place now, but... 16 years after it was built the village burnt to the ground and that completely affected the nature of trade and settlement within the village so everything was rebuilt but all the merchants moved to nearby Bradford-upon-Avon.

Curiously, Bradford-upon-Avon is where all the stone came from that built this place. So it's about... 10, 12 miles away, but you can identify particular quarries as you walk around. I mean, outside you may have seen the stones rather sort of marbled and veiny, but look around in here. Look at these beautiful... piers of this arcade it's wonderfully smooth well bedded stone so they're selecting their stone for you know different aesthetic and technical purposes really and so

How much of what we're looking at now is original? So I noticed this has got an oak ceiling here. It's not a stone vault ceiling here. Completely unusual. So this is a Leon. And it's unusual because the church that we're looking at is all stone apart from the springing point of the arch. You just see where these columns rise up and between the clear street windows, the stonework splays out and then it transitions into... And I think the reasoning for that is that they ran out of money.

Couldn't afford a stone vault. And that is often the case when we're working on a parish church now. We get to a certain stage and all of a sudden the parish said, look, we're just clean out of cash. So oak was a cheaper option. Originally, it would have been highly decorated. So I think that this whole church would have been highly decorated and you wouldn't have been able to distinguish between what was oak and what was stone.

Oh, that's an interesting point. But really, I mean, you do get the sense that this must have been incredibly expensive. Oh, my goodness me, yeah. It would have taken a vast proportion of the merchants' income to pay for this. The merchants paid for the aisles. which we can see to the left and the right of us, and the parish paid for the nave.

So you're more working people, you know, but they would have paid not necessarily in cash, they would have paid in labour. So to construct this, there would have been a skilled team of Mastercraft's people, a few labourers, and then the village would have provided the grunt. Simple as that. So, you know, getting stoned up is no easy task. But if everyone in the village is coming together, job done, isn't it? So with the chancel, that would have been paid for by the...

historic landed gentry. So the development of this church is that there was probably a Saxon church here. There's no evidence of it. And the first recorded... mentioning of the church here is in the 1230s, but there's nothing here of that church left, apart from when we go up the stair tower, we'll see bits of old stone that have been reincorporated in, which always I find. Quite exciting.

The only early part of the church that would have been left is the chancel, which would have been 13th century. This is a Victorian replacement of what was there before. And the tower would have been constructed before the nave and the aisles that we can see now. So there would have been a period where...

to be in this whopping great tower standing on its own, all this would have been a construction site and the chancel would have been used for services. There'd probably been a temporary structure, temporary roof, a thatch roof over here to keep services going for the locals.

So that, I suppose, explains really well, you know, how they're getting this wealth. And I love this idea that it's sort of almost a community effort with all the different levels, well not all, but many different levels of society actually contributing to it.

But, I mean, this is an unfair question, but why? That's the other question. Why are you spending all that money here? Is it to sort of show off the wealth? Yeah, exactly. Is that what it is? It's to outdo the next parish, you know, so these new merchants... millionaires could say to their neighbors, oh look, we've, you know.

As oligarchs do today, you know, when they're investing in museums or what have you. And they've done it really well, haven't they? And, of course, to the glory of God, most importantly. Well, of course, yes, there's that too. Fantastic.

Perfect, that was the key in the door. Okay, well, show me a bit more of this church then. What else is here? Okay, well, it's absolutely chock full of items of interest, but I'm going to take you to my favourite part, which not many people know about. And it's a place that many parishes would have had up until the time of the Reformation. Oh my goodness, so we've just come to this tiny little door in the side, the big iron key, and it says...

Samuel Hay Library. Yeah. So there's a little staircase going up. It smells nice, doesn't it? It does. It smells old. Old, rusty manuscripts. Oak. Wow, this is incredible. So this winding staircase, stone staircase. Another door. Another door. Oh my word, look at this. There's no lighting in here.

we've got an air conditioning unit in just to preserve the books so samuel hay whose image you can see on the back there was a vicar here in the 19th century and he was a great collector of books and there was a collection of books from the late 16th century that he was given and he kept them at the rectory but when he retired he presented the summer money to the parish to pay for this charming library that we've got here.

timber themed ceiling and there's a cabinet along one wall yeah just filled with old books yeah and what are they well it's like i see there's no lighting here so i'm putting my torch phone on let's take a random The smaller ones are the best. What's this? So this is a paperback sized book. Does that say Thurza Smith? I know, somebody else. Yeah. Astronomy is the science of looking up. Incredible. I like that. Love that. It's true. Yeah. And the book is Natural Philosophy.

in which the elements of that science are familiarly. Can you say that? Explained. 1829. So this is one of the more recent books they've got. I mean, when I come up here, I just pick up her.

a random book and have a little thumb through just to you know there was uh inscriptions from the original owners there was a book i was looking at the other day and it says mary wells her mark her book and it's just a cross in that nice little copper plate writing that the vicar has written for her fantastic so i mean so this really shows that

The link between the church and also about knowledge and books and reading. These aren't just religious places, but there's actually people here who are very much...

Seeking knowledge as well of the natural world, which I think that book especially demonstrates. Yeah, but it just indicates what a hub of the community the church was. It's not just for... prayer and thoughts you know these are marketplaces these are where contracts were exchanged these are where you know books are borrowed and um read and you know places of learning this was a school room

You get married here, you get dispatched here. It's absolutely everything of the community. And the community here in St Mary's are very much like that. They've been very supportive to us in our works. And they even bring us cakes. perfect what else do you need yeah tiny library up a staircase and uh this space is also known as a par vase

which is where parish meetings were conducted. So to have a surviving library is rather unusual. But this is where all the parish affairs were conducted. But I rather like the idea, you know, that window has been there since... the 1480s you know the archway

beneath us into the body of the church is a Tudor arch. So, you know, like I say, news of the Battle of Bosworth. You could have been sat here and seen that news brought to us through those windows. It's really absolutely amazing. It's just proper history. proper part of history isn't it yeah yeah fantastic brilliant I never tire of these places

No, no, absolutely. And you get some special privilege. We're going to talk about your work in a moment because you're very fortunate to get access to some places that people would never normally see. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't earn any money, really. I just end up doing it for love. We do bridges, we do medieval bridges and churches.

We always earn a little bit more money on bridges and that helps us to pay for the churches. So I'm writing a second book and I've written a large proportion of it right here. Oh, in this room? Yeah, yeah, Rosemary, the church warden who we met earlier, she said, yeah, that's fine, just use it when you want so.

Yeah, I've been churning out the words. Fantastic. I can't think of a better place to write a book. It could be more atmospheric, could it? We should start writing retreats up here. Oh, I'll let you go first. Okay. All right, so back down the winding staircase.

So shall we go onto the roof now and have a look at the hunky punks and some of the work we've been doing and the medieval clock? That sounds awesome. Yes, please. So it's another doorway. I've just unlocked this one. So say one key fits all here. I love these. And how old are these doors? Are they quite ancient too? I think this is a Victorian replacement.

or a copy of what was there before, but the main church doors through the porch are original, tremendously exciting. So original as in 15th century? Yep, 15th century woodwork. Amazing. So that means the metal work in the 15th century. So these steps going up here are tiny. And look out for the... what some people refer to as witch marks for trapping witches coming down this spiral staircase. There are colonies of ladybirds up there.

hibernating over the winter and as i say tiny tiny steps and it's going to be quite low here at the top oh it's more and more narrow doesn't it hold onto your socks All the things I do for this podcast. Right, another doorway. There's a really loose stone right above our head. I've got a fix. You see that big one there with the daylight for it? Oh, yeah. Okay. Don't want that on my head. Oh, wow.

So we're up on the roof of the baptistry, but we'll go on to the South Isle roof. We're going to climb under our scaffolding, clamber up this awkward step. Onto the lead. onto the lead roof yeah oh wow look at this So you're going to have to just tell me, why are you here? What are you actually doing here? Well, the hunky punks. So we're standing on the aisle roof and this is as gothic as you get. So we've got flying buttresses here.

We've got big clear street windows to allow the maximum amount of light in, the divine light. But you'll notice here, you see the flying buttress at the other end, but there were three missing. Yeah, it looked like they'd just been sort of... Chopped off. Yeah, exactly. So there are two schools of thought. Either they weren't finished or they were taken down. I don't know which one is...

Correct. But I know that the original roof structure of the nave would have been stone slates, which would have been really heavy. And that's been replaced with lead, which even though lead is heavy, it's actually a lot lighter than stone slates. So I think once they...

relieve the stress and outward pressure on the walls by replacing it of lead, these flying buttresses would have actually started to push the wall in. So I think they actually took them down to stop the wall. I mean, this wall is all glass, really, isn't it? It really is. I mean these are lovely big windows.

And at the top of each window, you'll see the hunky punks that you're keen on. Yes, I love this. Now, you are going to have to explain to our listeners exactly what hunky punks are. OK, so hunky punk is Somerset dialect for a grotesque.

or a gargoyle. So a gargoyle is a method of removing water through holes in the edge of the lead like that. It comes in the French for throat to gargle. So the gargoyles... move water efficiently down to the ground. But grotesques and hunky punks are there for a non-practical reason. They are apotrophic and they are turn-away evil.

So we all know about this these days. So it's no coincidence that they are of such a big scale and they are over such a big window. So the bigger the beast, turn away the spirits. the spirits with evil intent that higher their likely success rate. So these look pretty successful to me. I mean, they're kind of enormous.

They're really interesting, aren't they? What are they meant to be? Are they actual animals? I mean, they don't really look like dogs. Are they just sort of fantasy animals? They're fantasy animals, aren't they? They're Muppets. And what's so interesting about them is the whole range of them.

you know that one there's rather got a rather sort of moving like head hasn't it it does like huge big eyes and a tongue sticking out yeah it's neighbor is rather similar but it's neighbor on the other side I know all these very well because we've been working on them over the summer because they're in the wrong bedding plane.

So a bedding plane is where the sediment within the stone has been led down horizontally. And when it's quarried out, it should be led down in the same way. But these are edge bedded, so they've lifted the stone out of the quarry, carved.

the grotesque and put it in at 90 degrees so that immediately exposes the stone as a weakness and the stone starts to come apart like a opening book so we put loads of stainless steel pins and filled all the fractures we've not put any new carved work in here at all this is all pure lime based conservation but this character here it's like a mother it's eating its offspring like a ghastly

Frankenstein dog. And you can see the offspring in mother's mouth. See its hind legs in its mother's eye. Yeah, and it's kind of fighting back, isn't it? Because we've got these huge, huge big teeth. of the mother and this little baby just going, no. But before we managed to conserve and repair these, these were all completely covered in black sulfation. It was like burnt bacon all over and we had to poultice that off and take it away.

And now you can actually see the detail up close. I mean, the characters who made these were absolute geniuses, I think. I mean, it's so creative. I don't think they were making like a clay maquette. They were just cracking on and carving and probably carving in situ.

I see so they're literally made up there on some sort of slightly more rickety scaffolding than yours probably. But I mean these you can sort of see them from the ground up here but they're not really meant so much for looking up. Is it that sort of belief in what they were doing?

You know, they always say with grotesques and gargles, it was to scare the local population into, you know, believing the good book. But I mean, we come up here, we're not exactly scared, are we? We just want to laugh at them. No, they're cute. They're gorgeous. So I think they had some other purpose.

And I think it's no coincidence that the grotesques on the lower order of windows on the aisle are arranged as a trinity. So there's the big one on the apex of the arch, and then either side you've got two smaller ones. So I think...

I don't know. Personally, I think that's just symbolic. I just noticed something I hadn't seen before, actually. So, you know, we were talking about these missing flying buttresses. Yeah. Well, I hadn't noticed this lime, this package of lime mortar here that's been... led over bikes that does suggest that there had been a stone fixed into here okay yeah because this is we're just looking at one of the sort of cut-off buttresses and there's a big patch of

That's a good bit of archaeology there. Yeah, there we go. Ongoing. But you can see it's so perfectly, you know, that's not been worked over with a trowel, that's been pressed in with a stone. Yeah. So there would have been a flying budge here. Oh, that's fantastic. Amazing, so we've actually solved, or you have solved the mystery.

I'm going to have to think about that more. Perfect. I'm just thinking about these stonemasons. So you're a stonemason. In your work, this is what you do and you've been doing for the last 30 years, which is incredible. So you go and you conserve and repair old buildings. You do...

anything from some of the oldest stonework we have in the country really yeah and andy my business partner who you met earlier and i we've we've worked on so many fantastic places i can't believe the career that we've had and you know it's still ongoing you know we've worked to the West Kennet Long Barrow, which is the earliest structure with a postcode in England.

Which is Neolithic, isn't it? Yeah, it is, yeah. And that was sealed up when the Beacon people came along. We've worked at the Roman baths in Bath. We've worked on literally hundreds of medieval churches, Saxon chapels. We worked at the Saxon chapel in Bradford-upon-Age.

which is a great thing to get to know. What was really interesting about that was they didn't use any line-based technology to bed the stones, they used clay. And when we've worked on adjacent bridges and... canal works all the stonework's been bedded in the same way so there was this sort of continuity

You know, you just, if you pull the stone out, you just think it was a load of mud, but it actually smells of the river and it's still clay, so it's still doing its job. So when I pulled a stone out of the Saxon Chapel there, I just... knocked up the clay and bedded it back on, as with that sort of pad of mortar that we've just discovered there on the flying buttress, and then pointed up with lime. So I love that, you know.

Builders in medieval times would not have gone to a great distance to get their building materials, unless it was really high status and they were getting stone materials like perfect marble and alabaster, perhaps.

But not here. Everything here has come from within 10 miles. So I think that's so fascinating. The fact that the work that you're doing is essentially just carrying on traditions, doing things in exactly the same way that people have been doing, not just for hundreds of years, but actually...

thousands of years really so i mean do you think that your life as a stonemason is

Very different as the life of a stonemason in, say, the Middle Ages. Well, I'm more aware of health and safety, that's to be said. I mean, when the spire collapsed here, they'd just finished rebuilding the spire after it collapsed for the first time. So the second time... it collapsed it took the two stonemasons with it and they're buried underneath the north porch in an unmarked grave of course but the tools that i use are the same

as the tools that would have been used by Roman stonemasons. In the Ashmolean in Oxford, there's a mason's toolkit from ancient Greece, which is exactly the same as mine. A mallet, a hammer, a selection of chisels. Nothing changes. Obviously, we have to use power tools to be efficient.

I can understand the lives of the people who built this place. Even when you look around and you see oyster shells pushed in the joints between the stones, that would have been part of their lunch. And an oyster shell is a very handy piece of packing material, isn't it?

That's such brilliant insights. But you were mentioning that those two men were buried in unmarked graves. Is that really the case that most of the people who worked on this would just be anonymous people that weren't really remembered? Yeah, I mean, the masters...

are vaguely remembered, but there are so many important buildings that we don't know who actually built them. I mean, we would refer to them as architects these days, but architects are very much a modern... concept 18th century concept and before that would have been down to the master masons who have designed and for their proposal to the client and you know in the same way that an architect does so that would also and if we go back to middle ages that would have been quite a high status job

Absolutely, yeah. To become a master mason, you know, there are lots of different grades. There are imagers, which are carvers who would be creating these. They would be separate from the walling masons who were just, you know, squaring off the blocks. They'd be the big chief at the time.

top and you know this applied to both men and women in medieval period so there you know there are records of female master masons uh two of whose name escaped me but uh yeah after the black death everyone had to step up it was all hands to the pump wasn't it so uh there are records of female master masons continuing their husband's businesses and being very well respected for it. Fantastic.

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okay so just looking down now I'm just looking out over the churchyard in the cemetery here and you pointed out before we started recording when we came in you pointed out to me that This really is quite a lot higher ground. It's not that many gravestones at the moment, but it's really high ground. And why is that? Well, so this was the mother parish, the mother church of a very large parish. There's a bridge in some fields.

a mile or so yonder, which is part of a coffin path where the parishioners of West Ashton Village would bring their dead to this churchyard. So this churchyard is absolutely vast. It's over an acre, but you see... how high it is compared to the surrounding lane and the pathway over there so that's just because obviously the graveyard is chock full of

Corpses. So this is literally just graves and burials and bones just building up. I mean, it must be at least a metre and a half, maybe. If you think people have been buried here since Anglo-Saxon times, so say 50 people are buried a year. Over a thousand years, I can't do the maths off the top of my head, but that's 50,000 people. There are 50,000 bodies in here, which is likely.

That's probably a conservative estimate after the Black Death and the various other plagues that would strike communities like that and snuff them out. And of course, you mentioned that earlier, didn't you, that the Black Death especially had a big impact on the church and the development of it. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. If the Black Death wouldn't have happened, the decorated Gothic period, which was the precursor to the perpendicular, the decorated is all about exuberance, the individual personality of the Mason. I mean, these teams of... masons who were carving stone in the decorated period like a school of dolphins they were so free thinking and free that you know they could carve in a free hand style but with the black death

Everyone died, basically, and the masons had to become more efficient. So if you look at these windows, it became shop work. So it was like a production line to churn out more linear stonework. So if the Black Death wouldn't have happened... wouldn't have had these bigger windows these perpendicular windows and indeed big towers like this in the medieval period churches tended to be renovated and replaced every five generations you know taking that off the top

my head so when the black death came especially in the west country as i say there's so much money sloshing around that people they couldn't build or buy a new church because the church was there so they would stick western towers on the edge of that church so the tower that we can see here it's classic west country church tower a belfry it's about 14

or something like that. So it's about 10 years before this aspect. So the development of this church occurred in stages. And can we go up the tower? Yeah. Do you want to go inside or up our scaffolding? Well, let's have a look. So our next job in the spring is to repair these big...

Clear stream windows. And you can see how, you know, the mullions go up and then where they split towards the top, you see how they're just coming apart there. So that's going to fall to the ground too. And they're all smoke blackened from the chimney. fires around here and that smoke blackening has a very detrimental effect to the stonework causes it to blister and pop and fills it full of salts so the salts crystallize just below the surface cause it to pop off so we've got a busy spring here

So, I mean, it just really hammers in, doesn't it, no pun intended, how much work it really takes, not just to build them in the first place, but just to make these last for 500 years and more. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty jolly impressive, isn't it? And, you know, I have to say if the Victorians hadn't intervened, the story might have been quite different. But the architect here was an enlightened Victorian architect. He had a light touch. He didn't scrape.

all the original wall paintings off the walls. He's kept the stonework pretty much as it was. The new chancellor is sympathetic but lots of Victorian architects were dreadful and they would just flatten a church and rebuild it in their own image of the Gothic. movement. One key fits all. Another staircase, so this is up to the tower is it? Yep, bigger stairs now.

That's slightly easier. Yeah. This is how you pick it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I'm quite impressed. Good for leg day, this. Oh, my God. How high is this tower? How do you think? 100 foot high, okay. Can we counter the number of steps? No, by this point I'm bleeding from the ears. It does feel quite intense.

It's not being out of breath, it's the recovery time that's important, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. That was a steep... Oh, and that's the church clock. Yes. OK, so... Up in the tower. Yeah, well, that was quite a climb up the stairwell, wasn't it? So we'd gone past the ringing chamber where the ringers, you know, pulling their ropes. The ropes come through this chamber, which is the clock chamber, and go up to the bell chamber, which is above us.

Look at the size of those pieces of lumber. There's giant big timber beams in there. Yeah. In the roof above us. What's interesting about these beams, that they in turn support... The clock men pointed out to me the other day is that the great tenor bell that's above us is bigger than that aperture there. So how do they get it up? How do they get it through there? Well, it came through this trapdoor. You see how this trapdoor is bigger than...

Oh God, the thing we were just standing on. And then he said, look, they're on wedges. So these two beams are on a beam that's built into the wall at either end. And they're wedged up, so you just knock the wedges out. And then you can just hammer the beams out of the way to drop or take up a bell. I think that's fantastic. That's really, really brilliant. Ah, Hylia. Seen.

1795. So quite a modern roof structure, but yeah, that's got to support many tons of bells. This is the name that's carved into the huge beam above us now. Yeah. And then what we can hear in the background is the ticking of the church clock. I think this is my favourite space in the whole church. When we take on a new church to repair, I always come and see what the clock is like.

And there's a mention of a clock at Steeple Ashton in the church tower in the 1540s. Oh, that's quite early for the church clock. So I think that this frame... So there's a big square frame, big rectangular frame, sorry. It's all blacksmith made. You see the lovely curls on there. Even the bolts that are bolting it all together and the mortise and tenon joint here. This is all blacksmith made. So I think this is the...

medieval frame, and the inside part of the clock is a bit later, maybe mid-17th century. But that is replacing most likely a medieval church. Clock. That's quite extraordinary. But I wouldn't be surprised if some of the cogs are medieval, you know. They do look it, don't they? Some of them are absolutely not new. And... So how unusual would that be in the Middle Ages, in a rural location like this, to have a church clock? Yeah, well, today, one of the jobs that we're doing is re-guilding the...

clock externally, the clock face. We've redecorated it and conserved all the numbers. And there's a shaft that runs from here that drives the hands that tell the time. But originally this would have been a bell only. clock so he would have just chimed the hours chimed the quarter hours so the workers in the field knew when to come to church or when to go home or you know just one extraordinary scientific instrument to have probably made by the one of the foremost

blacksmiths in the region we had a scientific understanding yeah and that that i think that point that we were making earlier on when we're looking through that library that this wasn't just a religious institution but it was also as a gathering point for for lots of people with scientific uh interest and knowledge and then sort of sharing that knowledge presumably as well yes exactly so exactly so what i like about this is that it's all powered by this see that massive lump of lead

Yeah. So it's the same idea as a grandfather clock. We've got the lead weights that are pulling down. But these are lead weights of a different order, aren't they? Yeah, they're really quite enormous. Yeah. So the speed of the pull directs... how fast that continues to rock so

The clockmaker was telling me that the lead weight might be a little bit too heavy, so that makes the clock a bit too fast. So I said, what, do you have to shave bits of lead off the weight? He said no. He's got other adjustments he can make. Isn't it wonderful? It's beautiful. And this lovely cabinet that's in as well.

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Oh, right, okay, so it's squeezing into a tiny space. We're right at the top of the church tower. These are the bells. These are the bells. Look at this beautiful timber bell frame. It's a real work of art, isn't it? It's incredible. Yeah. I really hear the wind. It smells good as well. It does. It smells... I mean, this smells ancient. But these bells are not medieval. They are quite... No, these bells have been recast. They were recast in London.

in the 1930s yes but they took a copy of what was there before so they are a very good likeness but a little bit there It's an enigmatic space with the wind blowing through. Yeah, you can hear the sound, it's just that the wind is going, oh my God.

that resonance isn't it wonderful absolutely lovely yeah so we're right at the top of the tower and you can see the openings so they're flat pieces of stone placed into the window and they are to let the sound out and but also to keep the elements out as well and that's Somerset tracery so we're in Wiltshire so we're right on the edge of Somerset church tower design

And the church towers, as someone said, are the best in the country, in my opinion, but then I am biased. But if you look just to the right of the windows, you see these arches built into the corner. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so this is a design called a squinch, and that suggests that this was once supporting a spire, which it was, because it's Steve Alashton, you know. So the spire has come down on two occasions, both lightning strikes. But this squinch was designed...

to support the eight-sided plan of the underside of the spire. So what I find so interesting is that this is a purely Islamic... design so like i say these are known as squinches and this is how islamic engineers and architects designed the top of a octagon to support their domes so no dome architecture of islam

know spire architecture of gothic england and you know you can see that you know the design of those uh somerset tracery window openings yeah they've got an islamic touch about them they really do don't they that's absolutely the sort of feeling you get from being in space that's yeah yeah and uh you know everywhere i see i could see the hand of the hand of islam at work and that makes me very you know everything's come from somewhere isn't it even in rural this is as english as you get here so

OK, so this is outside on top of the tower. We've climbed right to the top. We're looking out on the wind. And you can really see how rural this is. Yeah, isn't it extraordinary? And you can see, look how massive Salisbury Plain is.

you know it's just a big ridge and plateau that just stretches away and that would have just been full of sheep so this church tower we're standing on now was paid for from the wall that came from the backs of those sheep and yeah it's nice the flagpole switching around in the wind up there yeah absolutely you can really get a sense of that all the cash all the wealth in the rural medieval economy and

This is just, I mean, there's no better place, I think, to just demonstrate how that worked. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you can see the... West Ashton is that village over there. So you can see how big this parish was. We're going just beyond that. And you see those two hedges that zigzag across. That's the coffin path that stretches all the way to West Ashton.

That's where they would come with all the burials to come to the church. So when the parish was reduced in size, there was obviously going to be resistance because the incumbent was deriving a fair income from all the outlying villages, bringing their dead for burial and charging an appropriate fee. this place isn't just making money on the backs of agriculture it's making money on the backs of their parishioners as well literally on their backs when they're carried in

What I like, especially, this is very personal to me, see the airfield there? Yeah. That's Kievel Airfield, and that was a Polish resettlement camp just after the war. That's where my father came. Oh, is that right? Yeah. personal family connections to the place. So like to get this job we've worked at Keeville church which is just on the other side as well so yeah.

Your father was a stonemason as well? Well, he was a stonemason for a time, yeah, because he was working as a miner. Too many of his friends were being killed after the war. So he was working with Irish. Highland Scots, fellow Poles, Czechs, Russians.

But they were blasting tunnels and people were dying around him. He didn't like that, so he started life as a granite mason. And we used to go on holiday to Scotland, where he was working on these hydroelectric schemes. And he'd say, look at that, son, I built that. It'll last a million years. And you know what, because it's granite, it'll probably last 10 million years. So I like the permanency of that. Yeah, that's a lovely thought. But working granite compared to this bath stone is different.

Yeah, I can imagine this is quite a... Yeah, my life's easy compared to this. Yeah, I can imagine. Andrew, this has been absolutely amazing. And I have to say, I do envy you being able to spend all your time in places like this. But, you know, you've been writing about it. So your one book is out already and is out in paperback, I think, as well. Yeah, yeah, it came in.

paperback it came out the week before lockdown so you know have sympathy for me and buy my book because it's really good it is really good I have it myself and absolutely recommend it because you take people through really the history of stone buildings in this country and from that personal perspective as a stonemason? Yeah, well, hopefully I managed to tell a new way of telling the history of Southern Britain.

No, absolutely. Highly recommended. Andrew, thank you so much for taking part in Gone Medieval. It's been an absolute pleasure to be here. Great. Thanks ever so much for coming, Kat. Really nice to meet you.

So thank you so much to Andrew Siminski, author of The Stonemason, A History of Building Britain. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Don't forget that if you want more medieval information... in your life you should subscribe to our newsletter the medieval mondays just follow the episode notes in the app where you're getting this podcast from and you can find out how to do that Thank you all so much for listening. I'm Dr. Kat German and join us again for the next episode.

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